Q&A with Poet John Mann

Poet John Mann was a English instructor at Western Illinois University and local resident for many years, and next week he'll return to read his work.

Mann, who retired from WIU in 2008 and currently lives in Iowa City, recently won the 2011 National Poetry Review Book Prize and had a collection of his poetry titled "Able, Baker, Charlie" published last year by the National Poetry Review Press.

He'll appear at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the third floor Sherman Hall Auditorium through the Department of English and Journalism with support from the Visiting Lectures Committee.

What are you planning to read next week and what are your poems about?

I'm going to read primarily from that book, which represents poems I've written over the last 10 years or so. I'll probably read a few new poems, as well, if there is time.

I think they would strike most readers as quite varied, but there are certain recurring subjects and themes. And I could say they are very short poems. They're 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 lines — most of them. Some of them are kind of fractured sonnets — shadow sonnets, you might say. They're not rhymed, but they're kind of like sonnets in a way.

They're very non-traditional in their voice and subject matter. It's hard to talk about your own work. I can say that they began in earnest after 9/11 back in 2001 and sort of came out of those really difficult years of post-911 and the Iraq War and so on.

One way that I dealt with those things was to begin writing poems. They're not specifically about that, but clearly the tone and material suggest they were on my mind. What happened is that my voice in my poems changed pretty radically. Prior to that, I'd written mostly nature poems, I would say, and they were fine, but some were conventional. The new poems under the pressure of contemporary events were very different. They were much more jagged, sort of raw and fragmented — full of sudden shifts and images. A lot surprising and sometimes outrageous material, and also these poems came very, very fast.

Did you surprise yourself in this sudden change in poem subject matter and writing process?

Yeah, I really did surprise myself. The process really changed. For one thing, almost all of them started with the title, and that was new for me. I got the title and then very shortly after that I got the poem. They were written very quickly. I revised them, but they often came out intact — sometimes two or three a night ...

The voice was very different, and the poems were very different. So for me, it was surprising how much work came out, and it was surprising how they sounded to me. They sounded very different from my previous work.

In your career, you've garnered numerous honors, awards and opportunities to publish. Is there any particular portion that you look back on, perhaps, the most fondly?

One thing that really helped me is that I won a poetry fellowship, I think it was in 2004, from the Illinois Arts Council, and that was a $7,000 cash award. So that was a tremendous encouragement to me, and it really helped me to begin to think that there might be something to these new poems. Also, I published many of these poems in small literary magazines, and some good editors started taking them. That became a source of great encouragement, as well.

Conceivably the most important was my teaching at WIU. I did teach American Literature throughout my career, but I got two new colleagues in Creative Writing in the 1990s. They invited me to teach in that program. So for the last 10 or 12 years I was at the university, I taught creative writing. This was very helpful. I loved working with student writers. I learned a lot from them. I was able to share my own work with them and so on. So, that is a very fond memory.

How long would you say you've been a poet?

I didn't really start writing seriously until I was in my mid-40s, which is really late for a poet, and it took me quite a while to figure out that that's what I wanted to do. I feel very lucky that began for me, that that door opened for me. Here I am in my 60s still writing. The other thing is that every poet, like every writer, goes through an apprenticeship. So I did mine in my 40s and early 50s and found myself as a poet in my mid-50s.

What had you mainly written prior to that period?

I did a lot of writing, but it was mostly academic that I did as a professor, and I wrote articles and essays on American writers. A lot of them happened to be on the poetry of Emily Dickinson — one of my favorites. I'm sure a lot of that had something to do with my becoming a writer.

What do you do in your free time outside of being a poet or instructor?

Iowa City is a great city for music, coffee houses and books, so I do a lot of that. Also (my wife and I) do a lot of traveling and camping. For example, some of the poems in this book are about Alaska, and I've made five trips there over the years. My wife is a photographer as well as a writer, and she does winter photography at night, so I go with her at night when she's shooting. We tramp through the snow in the middle of the night under the moon.

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